Microlearning in the Education of Future Teachers: Monitoring and Evaluating Students’ Activity in a Microlearning Course

Abstract

Microlearning has become a promising modern and effective approach to the education of various groups in recent years. In order to be able to further develop microlearning and consider student individualities it is necessary to map their passage through a course in detail. The article presents the conclusions of a research carried out at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ostrava. The aim of the research was to find out whether there are differences in approaches of studying a microlearning course. A microlearning course focused on teaching future teachers was created for the purposes of the research. The aim of the course was to present to students the possibilities of using digital technologies in the educational process. The research was conducted in the winter semester of the academic year 2021/2022. A total of 378 students participated in the study in the first phase (precourse survey) and subsequently 156 students in the second phase (analysis of course participants' behavior). Student activity was monitored during the study through learning analytics tools. Time of study, the number of realized events, the number of registrations, etc. were recorded for each student with these tools. The obtained data were analyzed using cluster analysis. Total of six different approaches that led to the successful completion of a microlearning course were described based on this analysis. The approaches can be used to describe a successful strategy to go through a microlearning course including the extreme ones. An interesting fact is that the choice of strategy is not influenced by the student's gender. The only parameter where significant differences were found was the number of days to finish the microlearning course. In addition, the article describes the behavior of students in the course, the types of learning materials, devices from which they logged in the course and list of the most used course components. This part of the data was recorded via heatmaps. A detailed description of students' study strategies within microlearning courses can improve the effectiveness of microlearning also in connection with the personalized passage and thus improve the quality and efficiency of the educational process of future teachers.